Malia, Lilian, Chloe and Brea 2019
It’s what we don’t say that interests me. The elisions in our stories.
This video piece is about women, the things we communicate and hold back from others. In this work, I attempt to describe how it feels to be a girl, restrained, censored, and also the realization of her strength, exercising her capacity for change. The girls are cautious but not compliant, challenging the viewer with their straightforward gazes, aware, defiant. Rather than objectify or glorify, I celebrate our contradictions and resilience. Straddling vulnerability, recognition, and resolve, my camera does not look at women, it identifies with them.
Looking through the lens, I reconfigure my own history and my relationship with my mother. But this time I’m holding the camera. These portraits speak to the silence. Wandering dep into my psyche, the process clarifies, brings me closer to myself, and suggests a sense of control.
Note: The text above was written by the Artist. No modification was made by COCA.
Lydia Panas
US Minor Outlying Islands
Lydia Panas works in photography and video and explore our collective societal relationship to women. Her work is attentive to the psyche and what lies below the surface investigating questions about who we are and what we want to become. Panas’ work has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in many periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, and NYU/ICP. She has received a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship. Her photographs are represented in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Allentown Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. She has two monographs, The Mark of Abel” (Kerher Verlag, 2012) and “Falling from Grace” (Conveyor Arts, 2017) and will release her third. “Sleeping Beauty” (MW Editions) in December 2021.